In an effort to provide better service and more accurate TV listings, Schedules Direct is moving forward with our plans to host TV listings data on our own servers. This new application will initially be responsible for parsing an incoming feed from Tribune Media Services, and serving it to the Schedules Direct membership community. Later plans include designing a web-based system whereby members can provide their own updates, enhancements, and corrections to the TMS data.
We are currently looking for a few experienced developers from the open source community willing to volunteer their help to design and implement this new application, which we expect to serve data to 20,000 or more members daily over the next few years.
Our current plans for this system involve a large amount of work with Perl, PHP, MySQL, and memcached. We also expect to need a caching/proxying load balancer like perlbal. In the process of developing this application, we will also be working with the XMLTV developers to create a new XML format that can represent the entirety of TV listings data (e.g. TV stations, episode details, and broadcasts of an episode at a specific time) in a format that is efficient for parsing
and serving.
If you are interested, please send us a link to your resume (https://www.schedulesdirect.org/contact), some relevant code samples, and a quick description of why you'd like to help out.
* Please be aware that though we will do our best to keep as much of this new application as open as possible (particularly the new XMLTV-like format), we will require that you sign an NDA in order to work with the TMS API and data.